Overnight, several people on social media reported that they were inexplicably signed out of their Apple IDs and then asked to reset their passwords when they tried to sign in again, and no one seemed to know why. Some reported needing to enter their iPhone passcode to connect to iCloud again, while others with Stolen Device Protection enabled said they had to wait an hour before they could sign in.
Apple's System Status webpage doesn't show any current issues with any of its services, so it's not clear if this is a widespread issue. So he said, 9to5Mac Reports That even a few of its employees were also affected by this issue. at least One Forbes contributor Looks like he ran into the problem too. The outlet saw no indication that this was related to the password reset attacks carried out by several publications, Included Forbes, Covered in March.
One Mastodon user said An Apple support team member told them that “sometimes random security improvements are added to your account,” while on Reddit, a person Today I posted a thread about this issue That Apple Support told them that their password “was changed around midnight.”
Some people said they also had to reset their settings Application passwords For third-party applications that have access to their Apple ID (email clients, for example).
However, not everyone had to change their passwords, as the person who posted in the thread above said that a password reset was only “suggested,” not required.
Mac developer Michael Tsai wrote a blog post About dealing with this issue. In “another case where my Apple ID was mysteriously locked,” he said he had to wait an hour to reset due to Stolen Device Protection, Apple's new security feature to keep iPhone owners' iCloud accounts protected if their phones are stolen. Apparently, the feature only listed a grocery store that Tsai visits every two weeks as one of the non-configurable locations where a one-hour password reset delay would not be imposed.
Apple did not immediately respond the edgeRequest for comment. Meanwhile, as frustrating as this problem may seem, at least not everyone has had to deal with it in such a difficult way:
“Freelance web ninja. Wannabe communicator. Amateur tv aficionado. Twitter practitioner. Extreme music evangelist. Internet fanatic.”